Journalists are also pushing the death narrative around nushu – at least, they routinely are in reportage I’ve been able to access in English. That’s a limited sample, admittedly, but it’s a sample that works well for our purposes. That’s because English language sources have fed into each other in a limiting way, in a way that perpetuates the death narrative.

But let’s back up a bit. Western academics are not the only ones shoring up their own critical authority by downplaying that of nushu users. The thing about journalism, in the English speaking West at any rate, is that it routinely relies on tropes for its angles, dulling the specificities of a particular story. In the case of nushu, such journalists have largely jumped on the academic bandwagon and continued the language death narrative. There tends to be a relegation of nushu to ‘a time in China when most females were illiterate and considered the property of men,’ to quote the LA Times obituary for Yang Huanyi. This relegation does not only erase the contemporaneity of nushu’s use, it continues the very silencing and social powerlessness of nushu’s users it highlights. It’s the difference between highlighting misogyny and helping along with making women a voiceless monolith.

There’s another trope on which articles about nushu have tended to rely: the battle of the sexes. I’ve seen a number of articles which use for their angle the male scholars who have ‘embarked on a sweeping research project to analyse the writing and preserve it’ (that’s from a 1991 San Francisco Chronicle article by Andrew Quinn called “A Secret Language for Women”). Downplaying the preservation performed by female scholars and users, this angle sets up a gendered rivalry of claims to knowledge about nushu. If there’s ever an appropriate place for the battle of the sexes shock tactic, so common in Western journalism, this is not it.

The thing is that nushu is not, has never been, a secret women’s language that the mighty academics and journalists are only newly making accessible to men. Men have always been able to understand spoken nushu; they historically elected not to use the written form because they considered it inferior to hanzi characters. The gendering of nushu use has never been defined by power over the circulation of knowledge but by practice.

The strength of the shock tactic requires social privileging of media trends rather than a critical engagement with information sources beyond the boundaries and conventions of the media itself. And that’s where English language reportage on nushu gets really troubling. The obituaries I’ve read for Yang and nushu are remarkably similar in structure and content, and heavily rely on reportage from Xinhua, the Chinese government news agency. Articles like the LA Times one linked above emphasise Xinhua and scholarly sources and give little space to nushu quotes and user opinions. That’s pretty troubling considering the nature of what they’re reporting. With women’s sources given limited power and transmission, the journalists themselves create the language death they report. Only a few journalists, notably Jon Watts and Huang Lisha in The Guardian‘s 2005 ‘The forbidden tongue‘, challenge the death narrative by seeking interviews with ‘the women still using’ nushu.

It is in rendering nushu secret and its users silent that Western journalists construct it as dead.

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3 thoughts on “Negating Nushu: Through Journalism”

I gather from the Guardian article that Nushu is dead the same way English is dead, because now we use it for writing about computers and biotechnology, rather than Shakespeare. It was probably that dreaded spelling reform, requiring us all to spell words one way only, that did it.

who are the academics who have declared nushu ‘dead’? how can I tell what is a western academic narrative/research if I am reading history or literature at university?

are you suggesting there are problems in the way ‘we’ talk about nushu around who has authorisation to say what nushu is or is not? (and if so… one might ask, what is *your* authorisation to speak of it and/or could you be using nushu here as a way of authorising yourself as a writer on social justice issues? and writing in English, in a western context, I assume without being privy/connected to nushu’s history of itself or without having read the stories around it which are in languages other than English? how are you not yourself as a writer here on this blog ‘discovering’ nushu’s death-and-discovery narrative in Western writing; ‘revealing’ it to us your readers who are interested in feminism, social justice, race etc?

Lin-Lee Lee, an academic who has been based in Taiwan and the United States, dates the “death” to the Cultural Revolution. Fei-Wen Liu, of Taiwan’s Academica Sinica, dates it to the 1980s. Imre Galambos, based in the UK, refers to nushu in the past tense, from an article I read by Jen Lin-Liu. If you want a specific cite on this being a generalised assumption in the Western academy, my notes tell me that you can consult Chinese Communication Studies: Contexts and Comparisons, eds. Xing Liu et al. You will notice that I have mostly listed Chinese names here. That is because it has been mostly Chinese scholars who have seen fit to debate it, which leads into your second question: the death/discovery tie is so thoroughly disseminated in the West (and, to be fair, the sources available outside of Chinese governmental control are so few) that Western academics haven’t really given a rigorous examination of this narrative a shot. It’s routinely assumed, past tense, rather than debated. I think I cited Jyotsna G. Singh on precisely how this works in my “academics” post, regarding how this plays out in India, and it’s also worth looking at Fei-Wen Liu on how nushu is treated as a 1980s academic discovery, and Daniel Heller-Roazen on how the present academic fascination with “language death” dictates how a lot of Western scholars address issues like this, or don’t. In terms of generalised analysis of Western academic narratives or research, there’s a wealth of material out there on postcolonial studies, subaltern studies, and Orientalism, I couldn’t pick just a few things! There’s also a whole other conversation on how post-Cultural Revolution China fits in with minority identities and the adaptation of old-school Western anthropological and scientific narratives in order to manage those identities, which complicates matters.

‘We’ above referred to the conversation being had between me and my readers, hopefully (I’m also sensitive about that term when unqualified https://zeroatthebone.wordpress.com/2011/05/07/who-is-we/). I have a history degree which centred China, which of course doesn’t grant me any great authority, just a little knowledge I wished to share. I do write in English (at least on this blog), and live in a Western nation, but am not identified with Western cultures or backgrounds, so I do not feel that characterising my writing as Western is entirely fair – although certainly I’m not from southern Hunan province, either. Talking about minority cultures to an an audience which generally was not previously aware of them of course risks that colonialist element of death-discovery-revelation – but then, explicitly and repeatedly pushing against that narrative, and explicitly addressing it as a sustained problem, is a far cry from repeating it. And as a historian trained in Western universities, and as a cultural minority person who found a lot of these kinds of narratives alienating while I was studying, as someone with the knowledges written out in these posts, and as someone with a (mostly?) Western and Anglophonic audience, I think it my duty to use my knowledge to back up the voices of writers and speakers and cultural practitioners like Yang who have been pushing back against the idea that nushu is dead. That’s my motivation, and those are my sources. Also, as a point of interest, this series was adapted from academic research I myself performed as an undergrad, and was therefore written specifically within a Western academic setting in order to push back against a lot of the orthodoxy I’d been told – not to authorise myself as a social justice blogger.

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